Shooting Up

This is Tepper's extraordinary story about growing up in a family of American missionaries in San Blas, a neighbourhood of Madrid, Spain, which had the highest rate of heroin use and juvenile crime in all of Europe in the 1980s. Driven to religious fervour on a mission to find lost sheep, Jonathan's parents take him out to the streets to invite addicts back to the family home. The addicts even play with him in his room, to the horror of fellow missionaries and American relatives. Before long Tepper's world is full of pimps, conmen, bank robbers, dealers, even murderers - and his home becomes a rehabilitation centre. Some addicts in San Blas died of overdoses and others drank themselves to death, but it was not the heroin, the alcohol or even the violence that took so many lives. AIDS hit Spain a few years after it exploded in San Francisco and New York, and it was just as deadly. For San Blas the virus was devastating; many of its youth became part of 'the almost lost generation'. When the epidemic engulfed the neighborhood, Tepper was a teenager and he stood by helplessly. The men and women in the center who were recovering from heroin became his brothers and sisters. He loved them in life and learned to mourn them in death. Yet it is the unexpected death of Jonathan's youngest brother Timothy in a car accident that leads him to truly understand grief and the preciousness of life...